Russell Group unis are destroying your creativity says Arts guru

Young creatives across the UK shouldn’t bother going to Oxford, Cambridge or the Russell Group because they blunt ingenuity and stifle innovation.

Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts, gave out some punk advice to teenagers who smash results days this summer.

He urged them to “stick two fingers up” at Oxford, Cambridge, and the UK’s leading higher education institutions because they’re tossing out vanilla grads who lack basic skills.

For Taylor, young creatives across the UK should avoid the stale 2:1 factory farm culture of the Russell Group and head “to a university that is creative and innovative and wants to do things differently.”

Why would anyone want to study at a Russell Group uni like Bristol?

They should instead opt for universities which are “more engaging” and want to “do things differently”, he told The Daily Telegraph.

Mr Taylor, a former head of Tony Blair’s policy unit at No 10, said: “If you have got good exam results, don’t assume that means you need to get on the next rung of the ladder.”

He encouraged those with the best grades to ignore the advances of elite institutions in favour of those with “a better and more engaging atmosphere”.

His riotous remarks come just a day before hundreds of thousands of sixth formers are due to collect their A-level results this Thursday.

Competition for places at top universities is expected to be brutal this year, with record numbers of applicants to Oxford, Cambridge and other top institutions Taylor advises us to sack off.

Taylor went in on the Russell Group

He slammed the Russell Group for creating a situation where students leave university “with very good qualifications but with quite big gaps” in their knowledge.

Mr Taylor – who studied at the University of Southampton and the University of Warwick, both of which are Russell Group universities – said that employers should disregard school and university qualifications when selecting candidates for jobs.

“I think employers need to say that qualifications are not an effective guide to what they want from young people,” he said.

“The only thing that [exams] help us concretely to do is to pass tests and then to move on the next set of tests.

“And so it goes on until people leave school or university with very good qualifications but quite big gaps in their capacity to be creative, to work in teams and to be self confident.”

He added: “The system at the moment has driven out an enormous amount of creativity, risk and innovation.”

The 24 Russell Group universities are typically regarded as the most prestigious higher education institutions which lead to the best employment prospects and highest paid jobs for graduates.